What I Know About Columns, Part 3

January 31st, 2010

I think that a three-column layout is really sort of a book design specialty. The one- and two-column set-ups are a lot more usual. The more limited three-column layout seems to work primarily in two kinds of books: textbooks using two even columns plus a third, narrower column for display items, such as subheads appearing to extend into the margin past the body text area, footnotes, or captions; and coffee table books of photo-essays.

I recently completed a modified version of the latter. Although not as large as the traditional, oversized coffee table book, this one featured a three-column grid that allowed photographs to run in quite a few different ways, occupying parts of, all of, and bleeding off, the page.

The same caveat as with two-column layouts—setting type so as not to make dense, dark pages—holds. Three columns make for two gutters, however, thus presenting another variable amount of white space to figure into this equation, along with the margins.

This kind of page layout works particularly well with a landscape page orientation—that is, a page that is wider than it is tall. The book I worked on recently that used this kind of format is on pages in a barely landscape orientation of 9.25 inches by 8.75 inches. The two gutters measure 16 points each and the text columns are about 13p10 each. The margins are generous but not overly so. For the leading I also went generous, 15 points for 11-point type. For alignment I went with something suited to narrow columns, ragged right, instead of fully justified, text.

And that winds up the usual options for the number of columns in a book design, unless you’re going to go some novelty arrangement with more than three columns.

Entry Filed under: book design